ABSTRACT
Disability has been associated historically with hypersexual activity and sexual immorality. In medical and popular discourse, disabled sexuality is thus caught between contradictory representations “of either tragic deficiency or freakish excess.” This chapter aims to trace both the overlaps and disjunctures within and between histories of sexuality and histories of disability as related yet distinct categories that reveal modern technologies of power at work. It presents a cripqueer lens to examine how histories of disability and sexuality have been related through processes of classification, containment, and rehabilitation. The chapter examines how strands of power are historically interwoven and suggests that ways for understanding what implications these strands of power hold for queer and disability politics. It argues that the invention of homosexuality as a form of modern subjectivity was intimately linked to the development of the disabled body as a knowable and measurable entity.
